"Three-Body Problem" by Cixin Liu

This is probably the most fascinating sci-fi book that I've read in a long, long time!  This is Chinese Sci-Fi - and it is both similar and different than American/European sci-fi (which has become a kind of an unspoken standard, but we often forget it is just one way of doing things).  There is no sex in this book.  Not even flirting.  No hot female characters (the main female character is in her late senior years).  The male characters are late-middle aged; not sexy, not even particularly heroic.  Did that turn you off? Wait, it is worth it!

This is my first Chinese science fiction, so I have to extrapolate (a code word for "stereotype") the entire local genre from it.  There's a lot of science.  And I mean - A LOT! This is one of the hardest science fiction novels I've read.  And some of the science is not simple (although very well explained in popular terms).  It takes some mental effort to follow.  And some knowledge of physics, and quantum theory, and 11-dimensional space concepts.  But wait, it's worth it!

The book starts with the horrors of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.  After she sees her father humiliated and publicly murdered on a stage by being brutally whipped with the clasps of the belts of four red guard high school girls (while her mother goes mad and her sister joins the red guard), Ye Wenjie signs a lifetime contract to join the "Red Coast" secret government base, with a huge satellite dish on top of "Radar Peak" which eventually she finds out is the Chinese SETI program, looking for intelligent aliens.

Since Wenjie is a brilliant physicist, just like her red-guard-murdered father, she finds a way to use a layer within the Sun as a giant amplifier antenna and manages to attract the attention of the planet "Trisolaris" - the only planet in a system with three suns.  Although a "pacifist" trisolarian warns Wenjie not to reply to the message, as otherwise the Trisolarian government will not be able to locate the signal, she replies immediately and thus gives the trisolarians the final parameter to precisely pinpoint Earth - distance.  She hopes that the trisolarians will 'cleanse' the Earth and fix human society, but although trisolarians try to play into that initially, eventually they make clear that they intend to destroy the human race and claim all of Earth for themselves.  They send a message to all humans: "you are bugs."

Trisolarians, who are much ahead of humans in fundamental science and have found a way to unwrap internal matter structure up to the 11th dimensions, send two super-computers as large as the surface of a planet but dimensionally wrapped into single protons - called "Sophons."  These Sophons stop all research in fundamental science on Earth by sabotaging experiments and driving top scientists to suicide and thus basically locking the scientific progress of the human race, making it easy pray for the much more developed trisolarians.  Human traitors organize themselves in Earth-Trisolaris Organization (ETO) and actively help trisolarians sabotage Earth science, rejoicing in the future destruction of humanity as a punishment for destroying Earth's environment.   The ETO also constructs a VR game which simulates some of the environment on Trisolaris and asks the players to solve various historical trisolarian problems in order to advance in the game.  ETO is divided into several factions, and one of them even created a religion from the Trisolarian lore, elevating the leader of the invading fleet (to reach earth in 450 years) as their "Lord."

The book has many more complicated aspects, Dr. Wang, a nano-materials scientist, being the main male character, and "Big" Shi Qiang, a hard-boiled policeman, maybe being the most sympathetic one, but it ends in a cliffhanger:  Wang accepts that we are bugs and will be met with the fate of bugs, but Big Shi takes Wang and his colleague to a field overrun with locusts and tells them that maybe humans are bugs, but bugs have always fought back and refused to go extinct.